The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper

by Tony Ortega

  Then, in July 2013, she heard from someone she had never known.

  Len Zinberg decided he needed to atone for what he had done 40 years earlier. He tracked down an e-mail address for Paulette Cooper, and sent her a note, describing what he had been keeping secret for so long.

  “My name is Len Zinberg, and though we have never met, I was one of those Scientologists who participated in causing you great pain during the 1970’s as a volunteer for the then Guardian’s office. I want your forgiveness, and realize that, at this late hour, I am totally undeserving of it. I have spent the better part of the last quarter century disentangling myself from the mindfuck that is Scientology…”

  He described breaking into Robert Kaufman’s apartment and also delivering pages of Paulette’s teenage diary to her father. In a subsequent telephone interview, he talked about first getting into Scientology and then becoming a volunteer for the Guardian’s Office. He described his relationship with Sylvia Seplowitz, who was sent on the mission to get Kaufman’s attention.

  Sylvia also agreed to talk about her days doing work for the GO, and described how her mission at the ballet studio to convince Kaufman to come home with her failed. She now lives in Maine, where she teaches art.

  Zinberg sent several more messages and then agreed to the interview. He worried that speaking publicly might engender the wrath of the church, but if that was the case, it was something he had become resigned to enduring.

  “I am contacting you now because I am a coward and should have done so much earlier…You have suffered more than any human being should, for the simple ‘crime’ of writing and speaking the truth. Ms. Cooper, I am 66 years old, married, and the father of 2 children who celebrated their Bar/Bat Mitzvah last year. Before I leave this earth, it is my sincerest hope to be worthy of your forgiveness.”

  Paulette thanked him for his courage in reaching out to her. “Mazel Tov,” she said, regarding his children.

  She was surprised that more Scientologists hadn’t come forward over the years, hadn’t, in the intervening decades, felt compelled to reach out to her and explain what they had done. But she was grateful that Len Zinberg had, at least. It was something she’d been waiting to hear for many years.

  “Your children would be proud of your e-mail,” she wrote to him.

  Like Len Zinberg, other people from Paulette’s past have left Scientology. Bill – the man who said he believed he was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ – is today a healthier, happier man who long ago left Scientology behind.

  Roger, Bill’s friend who first introduced him to Scientology, has a more complex relationship with the organization. After briefly dating Paulette, Roger helped the church retaliate against her once it became known that she was writing a book about Scientology. He continued to do volunteer work for the Guardian’s Office and then the Office of Special Affairs for many years. But after decades with the church, Roger, like many others, grew disaffected with church leader David Miscavige at the same time that he still admired L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology’s original ideas. He left the official church, becoming an independent Scientologist, and continues to admire many of the things about Scientology that brought him into it at the beginning. But he had separated himself far enough from the church to grant an interview for this book. Both Bill and Roger, however, feared retaliation, and each asked to be given pseudonyms.

  L. Ron Hubbard Jr. – Nibs – died in 1991 from complications of diabetes. He once said, “To be perfectly frank, my life’s been pretty much of a disaster and a miserable mess because of Scientology – and you can quote me on that.”

  John Seffern died in 1999 when he went to the VA for a routine injection that turned disastrous when a needle broke off in his arm, causing lethal bleeding.

  Paulette’s sister Suzy lives in New York. She has two children—named Rachel and Chaim after her parents—and six grandchildren.

  Albert Podell remains good friends with Paulette and Paul. It was Podell who was responsible for both of their introductions, and for helping her settle with Scientology in 1985.

  Dr. Stanley Cath, the psychiatrist Paulette saw in college and whose office was broken into to get her files, died in 2011. Dr. David Coddon, who administered Paulette’s truth serum test, died in 2002. Roy Wallis, the Belfast professor who wrote The Road to Total Freedom and tried to help Paulette after interviewing Nibs in 1973, committed suicide in 1990, shooting himself after the breakup of his marriage. Cyril Vosper, author of The Mind Benders, died in 2004.

  Nat Lorendi, who had administered the first polygraph exam of Paulette, died in 1999. Paulette’s prosecutor, John Gordon III, joined a prestigious law firm, and is now retired. Bob Straus left the district attorney’s office and became prominent in the field of judicial review. Charles Stillman, Jay Zelermyer, Virgil Roberts, and Paul Rheingold are all still practicing law.

  Tony Pellicano, the private investigator who worked with Paulette briefly in 1973 on a book about surveillance, is serving time in prison for illegal wiretapping.

  Bruce Brotman left the FBI and made news at his job as head of security at the Louisville International Airport in 2002 when he was accused of helping a 20-year-old female companion go through security unscanned to catch a flight.

  Richard Bast died in 2001.

  Ted Cooper lived until just a few months before his 100th birthday in 2010. Five years earlier, his wife Stella had died at 95. They had been married for 68 years.

  To the end, Ted kept his sense of humor, even as he began to fade. Paulette had told her father that if he lived to see 100, they would buy him a huge cake and have a woman jump out of it. “What kind of cake?” he quipped. After he was widowed, Ted lived next door to Paul and Paulette, and they had breakfast together every day until the end of his life. He attributed this longevity to them, but even though it was nearly 50 years later, the three of them avoided talking about the events of 1973. The subject was still too painful.

  James Meisler, the “reverend” of the New York Scientology church who received the bomb threat letters, now lives in Sacramento and works for a company that helps factories automate. He declined, politely, an invitation to be interviewed.

  Michael Meisner, the man who turned witness for the FBI after leading so many of the infiltrations of government offices for the Guardian’s Office, now lives in New England after retiring from a job in the energy field. He refused to answer questions for this book.

  Michael Flynn no longer handles litigation against the Church of Scientology. He said he couldn’t talk about his former cases. But he offered words of admiration for Paulette Cooper, even after her not so kind words about him were brought up. “I still feel nothing but compassion for her. What Hubbard put her through no one should experience,” he said.

  David Gaiman, the Scientology UK spokesman who tried to intimidate Paulette at the Edinburgh airport in 1970, who provided responses to her questions that became an appendix in Scandal, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator by the Justice Department in the Snow White prosecution, and who showed up in the 1980 episode of 60 Minutes deflecting questions about Hubbard and Scientology spying, continued to be the face of Scientology in England until his death in 2009. His entire family was deeply involved in the church and remain so today; his widow, Sheila, continues to give large sums for Scientology construction projects, his daughter Claire Edwards is a dedicated Sea Org official in Los Angeles, and his daughter Lizzy Calcioli has appeared on British television defending Scientology practices.

  But it was his son, Neil, who became the most famous member of the family. Neil Gaiman left Scientology sometime in the 1980s, and since then he’s become one of the most successful fantasy and science fiction writers in the world. In 2013, he published a short book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was inspired by an incident at his childhood home, where his father took in Scientology boarders who were taking classes at Saint Hill Manor, L. Ron Hubbard’s estate in East Grinstead, England. Doing publicity for the book, Gaiman
carefully handled interviewer questions about his relationship to Scientology, and in some ways his situation reflected what many ex-members go through. Most people who leave Scientology never speak publicly about their experiences. There are many examples of Scientology retaliating against people who leave, just as it targeted Paulette Cooper.

  And by 2013, Scientology was in deep trouble. Longtime, loyal members had been breaking away for several years in a growing revolt against the leadership of David Miscavige. At the same time, antics by Tom Cruise and other Scientology celebrities erased the media’s longtime skittishness about covering the church. And increasingly, state and national governments around the world were beginning to take a harder look at Scientology’s practices.

  Still, there were infrequent victories for the church; in late 2013, Neil Gaiman’s nephew, Alessandro Calcioli, and Calcioli’s fiancée, Louisa Hodkin, won the right to a religious wedding in a Scientology church as England’s highest court decided that Scientology’s orgs did qualify officially as “houses of worship.” But the British press judged it a calculated ploy to gain recognition, and said they were on to Scientology and its history of bad behavior. Some of the articles even mentioned the long-ago experiences of a writer named Paulette Cooper.

  Marty Rathbun, the Scientology executive who had tried to neutralize Paulette as a legal threat, left the church in 2004 and then disappeared. He resurfaced in 2009 by writing a blog that was harshly critical of Scientology leader David Miscavige, who responded by sending waves of private investigators, attorneys, and other operatives to South Texas to stalk and harass Rathbun and his wife Monique, who had never been a member of the church. In 2013, Monique filed a harassment lawsuit against Miscavige and the church, and her list of grievances sounded very familiar to anyone who knew what Paulette Cooper had gone through 40 years earlier. Scientology, Monique alleged, had tried to smear her husband with the use of private investigators, had followed and photographed the Rathbuns wherever they went, and did what they could to make it almost impossible for them to make a living.

  Forty years later, it seems Scientology and its methods of retaliation had hardly changed at all.

  Paulette and Paul live in Palm Beach with their two small dogs. They have been married for 26 years. She continues to write books – she’s up to 22 now – and she has a column about pets in the Palm Beach Daily News. Around town, she’s known as Paulette Noble, and few of the people she meets have any idea about her past as Paulette Cooper, the woman who took on the Church of Scientology and became its most famous target for retaliation.

  She’s still “a finely honed…accumulation of nervous energy,” as John Marshall described her in 1980. Even at 72, she gives you the feeling that she’s never going to catch up on all of the things she’s trying to get accomplished.

  She bristles when it’s suggested that she’s done quite well despite her years of harassment. “Those fifteen years of my life are still so painful I hate to think about it,” she says. “That’s almost a quarter of my life that was miserable, and one year – 1973 – that was so horrible it still often haunts me and has become the benchmark for my life – before and after the frame-up.”

  She has never really recovered from the anxiety of those years, of nineteen lawsuits, invasion of her privacy, of having to come up with the money for legal bills, of worrying that anyone she met might be spying for Scientology. “I chased a lot of people away. They didn’t want to be friends with me because I was so obsessed with Scientology and it made them nervous,” she says.

  Some of it, she admits, was balanced out by the constant inquiries from people, many of which she was able to help. E-mails have come from around the world thanking her for exposing Scientology’s abuses. And one story she says affected her the most – a man in his fifties who wrote to tell her that years ago her book had given him the courage to leave Scientology. He then got married, had four children, and runs a company employing about 50 people. He told Paulette that he felt she was responsible for his happiness.

  “That reminded me of why I did what I did, and why journalists do what we do. We try to tell the truth so it can help others,” she says. “Unfortunately, we sometimes pay a terrible price for it.”

  Tony Ortega is executive editor of The Raw Story and former editor-in-chief of The Village Voice. He’s been writing about Scientology throughout his career, and also operates his own website with breaking news about the church at www.tonyortega.org. He lives in New York City. The Unbreakable Miss Lovely is his first book.

  First published in Great Britain and the United States by Silvertail Books in 2015

  www.silvertailbooks.com

  Copyright © Tony Ortega 2015

  1

  The right of Tony Ortega to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Silvertail Books or the copyright holder

  Typeset in Ehrhardt Monotype

  ISBN 978-1-909269-30-9

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since I began writing about Scientology as a reporter for the Phoenix New Times in 1995, I have spoken with hundreds of current and former Scientologists about their experiences, particularly after I started writing daily about the church while I was editor at The Village Voice (2007-2012) and then later at my own website, The Underground Bunker. But researching and writing The Unbreakable Miss Lovely presented a special challenge—finding people who had witnessed or had even taken part in the ordeal that Paulette Cooper was put through between 1969 and 1985.

  Paulette herself was my first resource. She had initially contacted me many years ago, when I was writing in Phoenix and then at New Times Los Angeles, sending me encouraging emails when I wrote about Scientology. After she and I discovered the details of her childhood for the first time in a story for the Voice, I flew down to Florida to present my ideas for a larger project in the fall of 2012, not sure if she would be interested. Despite the misgivings of her delightful husband Paul, she was ready for a book to be written, and she started me off in numerous directions to track down sources. Almost right away, we began to have great luck as “Roger” and “Bruce” were located and each decided, for the first time in 45 years, to talk about Paulette’s introduction to Scientology from a man who thought he was Jesus Christ.

  While I pumped my own sources for information about finding former Guardian’s Office members, I also received a huge boost from the world’s foremost academic who studies Scientology, University of Alberta professor Stephen A. Kent. My great thanks also to his student Robin Willey, who dove into Steve’s trove of documents and found some crucial items that became very important to this book – the unpublished 1972 harassment diary that Paulette wrote for her attorney Paul Rheingold, for example, giving me unprecedented clarity about what she was going through in those days. And another previously unseen Guardian’s Office document from 1971 which showed its day-by-day surveillance of Paulette, more than a year before she had any idea she was being watched so closely.

  Personal interviews of people who appear in the book include Paulette’s sister, Suzy Bucholc, her cousin Joy Heller, and Joy’s former boyfriend, who asked not to be named. The list also includes former attorneys Charles Stillman, Jay Zelermyer, Virgil Roberts, and Michael Flynn (who was limited in what he could discuss), former FBI special agent Christine Hansen, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Elaine Viets, polygraph expert Frederic Joshua Barnett, and National Enquirer editor Maury Breecher.

  The former members of Scientology who appear in this book have all risked harassment and worse by merely picking up the phone. My gratitude and respect go to Len Zinberg, Jim Dincalci, Nan McLean, Nancy Many, John Brousseau, Gerry Armstrong, Bill Franks, Lori Taverna, Ron
Haugen, Simi Valley, and Sylvia Seplowitz, among others I cannot name. Many other former members of the organization, including some of its top former officials, have been extremely patient with me over the years as I’ve tried to absorb L. Ron Hubbard’s arcane ideas. Just to mention a few, I want to thank Mike Rinder, Karen de la Carriere, Jeffrey Augustine, Marty Rathbun, Marc and Claire Headley, Kate Bornstein, Tory Christman, Lawrence Wollersheim, Chuck Beatty, Laura DeCrescenzo, Luis and Rocio Garcia, Spanky Taylor, Tiziano Lugli and Jamie Sorrentini, Jason Beghe, Paul Haggis, Tom DeVocht, Hana Eltringham Whitfield, Sara Goldberg, Michael Fairman, Derek Bloch, and Michael Laws.

  Thanks should also go to the Church of Scientology itself, which put together a detailed report on Paulette Cooper in 1974, as well as an entire book about the Snow White FBI investigation and prosecutions. These materials were studied closely, and ensure that the church’s views are represented accurately in this book.

  Other journalists and researchers have been instrumental in this project, including BBC reporter John Sweeney, Forbes reporter and author Richard Behar, former Los Angeles Times reporter Joel Sappell, New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright and his research assistant Lauren Wolf, filmmaker Alex Gibney, author Bent Corydon, attorneys Scott Pilutik, Graham Berry, Ken Dandar, and Ray Jeffrey, researchers Roxanne Seibert and Gary Hoffman, and performance artist and L. Ron Hubbard great-grandson Jamie DeWolf.

  Special thanks go to Jon Atack, the supreme Scientology historian, who not only deepened my curiosity about Scientology’s past, but read an early draft of the book in order to make sure it reflected that history correctly.

  And finally, a raucous wave to the commenting crew at The Underground Bunker, which keeps me ever on my toes.